Coal River Mountain Protestors Meet with Governor

The closest thing you might get in today’s world to Gandhists and followers of Martin Luther King, on a practical plane, are the campaigners in West Virginia against shearing off mountaintops for coal mining. Coal mining should be illegal, much less destroying the environment to do it.

As for obeying the law, the point of Satyagraha, nonviolent nonresistance, is precisely to take public action against unjust laws. They aren’t all just, and if corporations can buy politicians at will, as SCOTUS just affirmed, then there will be more and more unjust ones. If you stack the deck against the people in Congress, the people will just have to find other ways to protect themselves.

4 Responses

paul_h

Of course it's not as simple as that. Protesters turn out surprisingly small crowds and are often not rooted in the community. Most indigenous people support the coal industry and resent the outsiders.

gmoke

John Todd won the first Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award with a plan to remediate coal wastes with ecological filtration systems and to replace the energy with biomass production and windmills. John is not a dreamer but one of the best ecological designers in the world, a founder of the field.

Anonymous

To put it simply: "our business practices are destroying life on earth. Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will survive the global market economy." The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken. On a not much lighter note, Dismissing the facts of global warming based on an individual and corporate gain is dangerous. That goes without saying. But Can ecological economics rise against the global corporate market economy? Good luck earth. On a much lighter note, defining knowledge based solely on the tille of this informed comment is preposterous. And not to validate that notion, but the range of expanded awareness in this informed comment goes against that. From U.S. Politics, global politics, humanitarian crises, culture and global warming.. just to name a few. This informed comment is an example of how knowledge is not only defined by having experience in an isolated area, but also by apprehending facts. Simply cognizance and awarness. Leila.

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